A craft flown in Oregon decades ago will be displayed by an air and space museum

By John Foyston

When George Bogardus' home-built airplane made its third trip to Washington, D.C., it went by truck, and it probably traveled nearly as fast as when Bogardus first flew it east in 1947.

"Oh, I imagine it'd cruise at about 90 or 100 mph with that 65-horsepower engine," said Dick VanGrunsven, the Oregon aircraft designer who led a group of volunteers in restoring the 1939 home-built called Little Gee Bee.

Bogardus, who died in 1997, was an Oregon aviator who considered himself one of the so-called Beaverton Outlaws -- a group of pilots who flew home-built airplanes from Bernard Field, a gravel-runway airstrip that existed for 40 years where Cedar Hills Crossing is now.

"He had 18 or 19 gallons of gas, which gave him about four hours of range -- which is longer than you'd want to sit in that seat," VanGrunsven said. The cramped, bare-bones cockpit (eight instruments including the clock; no radio) included a ledge made of steel mesh that served as a perch for the 6-foot-plus Bogardus, who must've climbed into the 500-pound airplane the way a man might shrug into a too-tight overcoat.

No one will ever again climb into Little Gee Bee and yell "Contact!" while a line boy heaves on the wooden prop to start the motor. Corrosion in the fuselage and tail has grounded the silver, low-wing monoplane, and the engine is a mock-up. But the plane, which was shipped to Washington late last month, will soon be suspended in midair at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport as a reminder of when Oregon was a hotbed of roll-your-own aviation.

Flying and lobbying

And it still is, thanks in part to Bogardus and Little Gee Bee, named after its owners initials (unrelated to the barrel-shaped Gee Bee air racers of the 1930s named after the Granville brothers). Bogardus' cross-country flights in 1947 and 1951 helped convince the feds -- then called the Civil Aeronautics Administration --that home-builts were viable flying machines that deserved their own license category for home-built and experimental aircraft.

It ended a tussle that had simmered for a couple of decades. Oregon created a state board of aeronautics in the early 1920s to register airplanes and pilots for the first time. State inspectors issued small license plates to airplanes that passed muster, be they home-built or factory-made.

In the late 1920s, the federal government created what eventually became the Civil Aeronautics Administration to license airplanes and pilots. But it wouldn't issue permanent licenses for the home-builts being constructed at Bernard Field, Cornelius, Klamath Falls and elsewhere in Oregon. In a 1990 interview with The Oregonian, Bogardus said the federal experimental license was good for just 30 days while engineering tests were performed for permanent certification.

Not that the Beaverton Outlaws and other Oregon aviators were too worried -- they were licensed by the state. "The guys at the field kept right on building airplanes," Bogardus said. "People in Oregon have always been pretty independent, and we just thumbed our noses at the CAA."

The feds stepped up enforcement in the late 1930s and eventually took Oregon to court, but the case was dismissed. Victory was brief, though: World War II grounded civilian aviation for the duration.

Licenses for experimentals

There was no question that the CAA ruled the airways after the war. That's when Bogardus bought Little Gee Bee -- which was originally built before the war. Bogardus finished assembling and testing the plane in the summer of 1947, then flew to Washington, D.C., with proposals that led to the current experimental category license. The ability to license homebuilt airplanes triggered a surge of interest that continues to this day.

The Experimental Aviation Association has about 170,000 members around the world, and Bogardus was one of the first three people inducted into its Homebuilders Hall of Fame. Fifteen percent of the single-engine, piston-powered airplanes in the U.S. general aviation fleet are registered in the experimental category.

VanGrunsven -- known as Van to his customers and friends -- has designed a series of successful, high-performance home-builts called RVs: RV-3 through RV-10. His company, Van's Aircraft, operates from the Aurora Airport and sells 600 to 700 kits a year -- more kit airplanes than anyone else in the world.

Almost 5,000 of his RVs are flying, and almost as many kits are under construction.

Those thousands of sleek, Technicolor RVs -- and all home-builts, including Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne -- owe a debt to the "rusty, dusty" skeleton of Little Gee Bee that Bogardus left to the local chapter of the Experimental Aviation Association. "It's a pretty historic little airplane," said Oregon aviation historian Ken Scott.

But the first job was to get to it: Bogardus' property in rural Sandy was proof that he never threw anything away. Given that some of the detritus consisted of Linotype machines and parts -- the massive old typesetters once used by newspapers -- and that Little Gee Bee had been retired five decades earlier, it was hard work just unearthing it.

Putting it back together

"The airplane had been dismantled and stored in different paces," said VanGrunsven, who as an aviation-struck teenager used to fly into the short airstrip on Bogardus' property in Sandy for occasional visits. "The fuselage was at the Sandy airport, and the wings were on his property. We collected parts for a couple of years and took them out to my home shop in North Plains."

Volunteers from EAA Chapter 105 (including Mike Story, the son of the man who originally built Little Gee Bee) started spending Saturdays in Van's shop. "We started about January of zero-five," said brother Jerry VanGrunsven, a tall, lean former airline and military pilot. "It must've taken us about a year of hard work."

Most restoration projects include a lot of grunt work, and this was no exception: assembling the Continental engine from boxes of greasy bits; sandblasting rust from the steel-tube framework; replacing rotten metal and wood parts in the wings; building new control cables and flying wires; and re-covering the airplane in dull silver fabric, as it was when Bogardus owned it.

They didn't have every part, but they had lots of ingenuity. "We had a lot of pieces and some old photos, but we didn't have plans for the airplane. There were no real records because it was built quickly and on the cheap," said Dick VanGrunsven, who has meticulous plans for every piece of every airplane kit he sells. "So we had to do some detective work."

Most of the windscreen and canopy were long gone. But they estimated size and shape from old photos and made the new pieces out of Plexiglas. The tracks for the sliding canopy were still there, and half-oval aluminum edging from a marine supply shop served as the canopy framework.

Tires, too, took some fiddling. The hubs are an inch smaller in diameter than the smallest common modern tires (for Piper Cubs) so brother Stan VanGrunsven bought a chunk of engineering plastic on eBay and machined two adapters to mount modern tires on the old hubs. The plastic is black, so you can't see the modification unless you know where to look.

It all fits with the rough-and ready aesthetic of Little Gee Bee, said Jerry VanGrunsven. He pointed out the hand-hammered aluminum nose cowling, which is dull and has a few dents and divots in it. "We could have filled all that and polished it, but it never was bright and shiny."

The tires are also bald and scruffy-looking for a reason -- "Tires back then were treadless," Jerry VanGrunsven said. "We could've gotten new ones at considerable expense, but my sister-in-law pulled these old Cub tires out of the garbage at Evergreen."

George Bogardus would undoubtedly have approved; "I doubt this airplane ever had a set of new tires," VanGrunsven said.